


Protection

by MarshmallowNerd



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Drama, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Romance, Wanda Maximoff Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 10:35:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23849812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarshmallowNerd/pseuds/MarshmallowNerd
Summary: In a world where fate connects soulmates by sending possessions lost by one to be found by the other, Wanda loses everything she has to a mate that may not even be there.A companion toDevotion.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Wanda Maximoff, James "Bucky" Barnes/Wanda Maximoff
Comments: 4
Kudos: 81





	Protection

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to [Devotion.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22415209) That story does not necessarily need to be read to understand this one, but I personally feel as though they flow better with that as a predecessor. Hope you all enjoy! ❤️

Wanda never wanted a soulmate. Not at first, anyways. From the way her mother described it, a soulmate sounded like some sort of life-long companion she was meant to have. And she’d already been given one of those in the form of a twin brother. That was enough for her. Sometimes, even Pietro was too much. Always so overprotective, always demanding her attention, always telling her what he wanted them to do, or what she shouldn’t do because she might hurt herself. He was always so _there_. As a child, Wanda never liked the thought of having another person constantly there, even if it was because they loved her.

“The way your mate loves you will be different,” her mother had promised when she explained soulmates to her children for the first time. She had been combing through Wanda’s thick, windswept hair (or at least trying to) after Wanda had lost the bandanna that usually kept it contained while rough-housing with Pietro and his friends outside. “You’re connected to them because they will understand things about you that no one else will. They will know how to love you for it. Just like you will love them.”

Wanda had nodded along, but being the stubborn, perverse child she was at the time, internally cringed. She couldn’t imagine loving some stranger she didn’t know.

And yet, she was never all that upset whenever she realized she had lost something. Usually small, inconsequential things she wouldn’t miss like some of her crayons or one of her drawings somewhere in the patio area behind her apartment building (they were often confined there whenever they wanted to play outside, due to political riots and crowds of police that frequented everywhere else in Sokovia). She wasn’t upset to think someone else received her lost belongings and would hold onto them for her. She even looked forward to the idea of spontaneously receiving things from them in return. Things that would clue her into who this oh-so-important stranger was and what they were like.

However, nothing ever came for her. In those early years of her life, she didn’t think too much of it. She even assumed it was normal. That sometimes a person’s mate had _some_ control over what their other half received, and hers was too shy to lose anything to her, to bother her with holding onto their personal belongings for them.

It wasn’t until later that she began to realize how much a mate as silent as hers wasn’t normal. She was still a child at the time, having just started primary school. There, she saw how often other kids received their mates’ lost belongings. How finding things from your mate semi-regularly, like Pietro did from his, was more the norm than what she had with her mate.

It was then that she decided to deliberately reach out to her mate. Just to encourage them, to break the ice between them. She would write small notes in the corners of her school papers, and then let the wind blow them out of her grasp as she left the school building.

_Are you there? I never found anything of yours_

_Other soulmates send things back. Where are you?_

_Mama says I love you. Or I will. I wonder if you will too_

She only managed to lose those few messages before her teacher caught her and scolded her for wasting paper. Pietro told their parents about it later that evening, amused that she had been the one to get in trouble for a change.

When Wanda explained why she had tried to lose notes on purpose, and what she had been trying to ask through them, her mother told her, “You cannot push such things, _solnishko_. Fate puts us where we’re meant to be. If you try to force your mate closer to you, it will just make things more difficult for you both.”

Again, Wanda had merely nodded along to her mother’s words while internally disapproving of them.

As a few more years went by, still with her receiving nothing from her mate, that disapproval became frustration with fate as a whole. Frustration born from jealousy, as she watched her brother receive things from his own mate almost daily. Small trinkets, like drawings or cheap plastic toys or scrunched hair ties. Clear signs that _his_ soulmate was there for him.

Eventually, even her parents couldn’t deny that something was off about Wanda’s connection to her mate. She knew so because of one cold, stormy night in the winter before her tenth birthday. Their family’s apartment was so tiny, it was impossible to miss sounds coming from the den when she and Pietro were supposed to be asleep. The siblings had pressed against the doorless entryway of their bedroom, trying to blend into the wall so they wouldn’t be caught listening in on their parents’ conversation as the adults huddled close together at the dining table, their words difficult to discern amidst the rain pattering on the windows. Yet, Wanda could clearly hear her mother crying.

“There is _nothing_ wrong with her,” their father had said firmly. “If anything, it must be her mate. There must be something wrong with them.”

“What if…” Their mother had hiccuped. “What if they aren’t there? If she…if she’s _mateless_ , then…then who will take care of her after us?”

“She will find someone.” Their father had sounded almost desperate to convince his wife of the thought. “She will.”

Pietro had pressed closer to her. “You have me, you know,” he whispered. “I’ll look after you.”

Wanda hadn’t responded. She only curled in on herself, pretending not to have heard him. She knew her brother meant well, but she didn’t want any special treatment from him. She didn’t want _pity_. She would have rathered been alone when she got older, taking care of herself rather than having her brother—and his mate, who she had figured would find him by then—feel obligated to care for her, like she was a homeless stray with nowhere else to turn.

She never told her parents she had overheard their conversation about her. That it had planted a new seed in her mind that perhaps the reason her connection to her mate was so strained was because something was wrong with her. She didn’t think it could be what her mother had said, that she simply didn’t have a mate. She could just intrinsically feel it. Every now and then, she would feel a strange sort of twinge or pull. At the time, it was difficult to describe, but in hindsight, she felt as though it had been her very soul insisting that it wasn’t missing anything. It wasn’t missing its other half. It just needed her to find them, and was pulling her to them.

It wasn’t long after that night that she learned why her parents were so concerned about her being alone. That she learned how unsafe she was in her own home country. It struck her in the form of a bombshell in the apartment two floors below her family’s. It came out of nowhere, sending a shudder through the building before causing the floor beneath her family’s dining table to cave in.

Wanda had been too caught off-guard by the suddenness of it all to process what was happening, let alone react. Pietro was the only one quick enough for that, grabbing hold of her before she could fall into the freshly-created gap in the floor with their parents. He stuffed himself and his sister beneath their parents’ bed (presumably, because it was closest), even though the floor of that part of the apartment promptly gave way, too. The world rocked and shifted around them as another shell struck their building, making their former home struggle to level out within the remains of someone else’s. To Pietro’s credit, the bed over them did provide protection from the debris of collapsing floors above them.

Even when the world had settled around them again, still with the twins crammed under their parents’ bed, Wanda hadn’t been able to react. She physically couldn’t, for risk of setting off the second shell that lurked just a few feet away from them. For whatever reason, it hadn’t gone off upon impact like its predecessor. It stayed there. Which meant _they_ stayed there, for days. The bomb’s unspoken threat loomed over them with every shift in the bricks, with every attempt to find them, to save them. The situation was so dire—so _hopeless_ —that even at her naïve young age, Wanda was convinced either the bomb would kill them or starvation would.

Two days stretched on that way, with her and Pietro lost in the rubble. They felt like years in Wanda’s frightened mind, frozen in time both after and before destruction. She could practically feel the scent of death and grime ingraining itself into her clothes, her hair, her skin—into her very being. Staring at either the name, _Stark,_ printed on the side of the idle bomb in bone-white letters, or at a stuffed bear on the other side of them. Wanda considered it hers, even though she had been too young when she originally received it to remember treasuring it the way her parents said she did as a toddler. It almost seemed as though it had meant more to them than it eventually did to her. Even in those dark moments after the bombing, Wanda was wary of reaching out for it, of potentially ruining it any more than it had already gotten. As if her parents would chastise her, reminding her to be gentle with it. As if her parents were still with her.

But her parents were gone. And after two days, so was the bear. _Everything_ from their former home was soon gone. Left behind as the twins were finally found and pulled out from the rubble.

Which meant someone else had received everything that was once theirs.

Wanda was too swept up in shock to consider her soulmate’s reaction to receiving so many belongings at once. She couldn’t even feel the usual sting of jealousy when Pietro received something from his mate, a note asking if he was alright after whatever had caused him to lose so much.

It was then that Wanda began to wonder if her parents were right. That she may not have a mate at all. Why else would there not be so much as a question as to why she had lost so many of her belongings? Why so many of her belongings were destroyed, too?

She’d never stopped feeling that inner sense of longing. She had previously thought that meant there was still someone somewhere that her soul felt a connection to, that it wanted to find. But after losing _everything_ , and still being left with nothing in return, she had to wonder if she was wrong about that feeling within her. That everything that was hers was instead lost to an unfeeling void.

Her doubts about her soulmate continued to grow as she continued to lose everything that came into her possession. Without their parents, the twins were sent off to live in foster homes. No one household ever lasted for them due to the complications that came with an intensifying civil war zone within Sokovia. It soon became a pattern for them: finding a new home, collecting a few things of their own to keep in attempts to make it actually feel like home, and then being sent to a new home when the current one ran out of the funds and space to house both siblings when they refused to be separated.

Wanda was at least grateful for how Pietro held true to his promise to look after her. Especially since it was becoming increasingly more apparent that Wanda would have no one—not even a soulmate to eventually find—without him.

Another part of the pattern was Wanda losing the possessions she had been given by one foster parent during the process of finding another. It was never on purpose. It just sort of happened in the rush of moving out of one home to one who could afford (for the time being) to look after two additional children. There were some constants Wanda kept with her, such as a few of her more comfortable dresses or her more favored jewelry (that Pietro usually stole from someone else in the home). But more inconsequential things, like scarves, or gloves, or jewelry gifted to her by someone other than Pietro, she wouldn’t remember until well after they were in a new home.

An entire decade of Wanda’s life went on that way. Constantly moving, constantly losing all but a few items she actually valued. And every time she lost or forgot something somewhere, she never failed to be met with silence from her mate.

As she began to phase out of her teenage years, Wanda grew accustomed to the silence. She even learned to find catharsis in it. Whenever she could find spare loose leaf paper, or even a page from a book or magazine no one else wanted, she would write out her thoughts about everything and nothing whenever she had to leave another home. Always without describing where in Sokovia it was or where the next one was, so it wouldn’t count as “forcing” fate. Always abiding by her mother’s superstition that deliberately spelling out such things would only make matters more difficult for her and her mate in the long run.

She knew Pietro would do the same sometimes, unloading his thoughts on paper and then losing them for his mate to find whenever talking to Wanda wasn’t enough for him. For him, it was easy, seeing how his mate was continuing school and would lose notebooks to him sometimes (clearly by accident, seeing how the first few pages would always have actual class notes). Unlike Wanda, Pietro’s mate always wrote back to him. It didn’t bother Wanda as much as it did when they were kids. It didn’t bother her at all. If anything, she thought Pietro was more bothered by her mate’s silence as they got older. As he realized how fortunate he was to have a mate when he and Wanda would only have each other otherwise.

Ironically, that made him act more dismissive about the matter. He would flirt with multiple girls in Novi Grad, even though it was clear he knew none of them were his mate. As if he thought having a mate—a responsive one, at least—wasn’t a big deal, so his sister wouldn’t have to feel as bad about her nonexistent relationship with hers. If hers existed at all.

Wanda hated it. Just like when they were kids, Pietro’s well-meaning attempts to placate her only made her feel more like something was wrong with her by drawing attention to it. Not to mention, she was never fooled by his façade. She knew he still wrote to his mate. He still held his connection to them dear. And with good reason, too. As the three of them got older, and were of age to start making their own money to spend however they wanted to, Pietro’s mate would deliberately lose more items to him. Mostly food, like fruits, or bread rolls, or pastries. It happened far too often for Wanda to wonder whether those items were lost by accident. Especially when there were always extra portions for Pietro to share with her. By that time, the Maximoff twins had foregone the foster system and were trying to fare on the streets of Sokovia on their own, so Wanda had no qualms about accepting easy food from her brother’s mate.

Although, Wanda did disapprove of the way Pietro followed his mate’s example of generosity. As they got older, the twins continued to keep up with the children still in Sokovia’s foster homes and tried to help them where they could. Honest money was hard to come by for orphans with no home living at the heart of a civil warzone, so Pietro often resorted to stealing supplies for the others. The stealing itself wasn’t the issue—Wanda was used to it from her brother—but how reckless he got after every endeavor was. Stealing things for himself and his sister from foster parents that were too busy to notice was one thing, but graduating to public shops and cafés for themselves _and_ others made him fair game to the police.

“You’re going to get yourself shot one of these days,” Wanda would tell him, only to be met with a dismissive wave and roll of eyes every time. Then they would drop the subject, because there was always something more pressing to attend to. Whether they needed to find a place to stay overnight, or needed to reach whatever temporary job one of them had managed to secure for a while, or even found yet another person who came to them for help getting something.

When they weren’t preoccupied with any of those tasks, they were fighting. Finally standing up to the feuding political leaders and foreign imperialists who kept the country of Sokovia in the decrepit state it was in. They fought in the form of street protests, joining other members of Novi Grad’s impoverished underbelly outside of politicians’ offices and hotels in attempts to make them see the people suffering from their quarrels for control over the country.

For years, the twins’ struggles to fight for a better version of their country were in vain. Unheard by anyone with the authority to actually instill change. And then one day, they were approached by an opportunity to become that change they were seeking, themselves. It came as a man in a white suit and grey jacket, escorted by a team of men in thick, padded black soldier uniforms.

The way the man in white made his pitch unnerved Wanda. He clearly meant to be welcoming, to make his proposal at least seem intriguing. But his grin was so artificial, and his demeanor so absurdly relaxed even as people continued to shout their protests as he spoke. It made it hard to catch every word, especially where Wanda and Pietro were at the very center of the crowd, but from what Wanda could gather, he was a member of a subsidiary group of an international security organization known as SHIELD. They wanted volunteers for their new program to instill everyday individuals with physical enhancements unmatched by anything else science had developed thus far. Their funds were being saved for equipment and procedures, but any volunteers were promised payment through power greater than the politicians and war-mongers that they were protesting at that very moment.

Wanda didn’t trust it. She didn’t trust the man’s demeanor. She didn’t trust that his instructions were only to go to the Ayrshire Estate and ask for the Baron Strucker with no other contact information. She didn’t trust that something so seemingly innovative and critical to scientific development had been presented to a group of the city’s most destitute population rather than the influential elite.

She did, however, trust her brother. And even though he acknowledged the suspicious aspects of the proposition with her, he also pointed out that they didn’t have many better options.

“It’s been years,” Pietro said that night, when they had managed to find a private corner behind the building of the shelter they were staying in for the time being. Wanda had been leaning against the wall, staring listlessly ahead as her brother spoke at her, trying to reason with her. “We’ve been doing everything on our own for fifteen years now, and it’s only getting harder. Nothing is bringing any change. Maybe what we need now is to try something completely different.”

Wanda hadn’t known what to say. She didn’t want to commit to something she had so little trust in, but she also couldn’t deny that Pietro had a point. They were getting nowhere with the lives they were leading. They had (literally) nothing left to lose if something went wrong.

She never outwardly acknowledged that she could see her brother’s reasoning. She only asked him, “If it does change us…will you tell her?”

Pietro had taken a step back with a soft, troubled sigh. He hesitated for a long, uncomfortable moment before gathering the nerve to ask her in return, “Would you tell yours?”

It was Wanda’s turn to sigh shortly. Pietro rarely brought up her mate ever since becoming convinced she had none. She never told him that she wasn’t particularly sensitive about it, as mateless people typically were. She just still couldn’t decide if she truly believed she was mateless.

“I will, eventually,” Pietro insisted after a moment of silence. “Right now, I don’t want her to worry. She’s already so stressed, and if it doesn’t work—or if it isn’t really what they say it is, then…then, I won’t know how to tell her.”

Wanda heard what he didn’t say.

He didn’t want his mate to know he was willing to go to such lengths to change himself. He didn’t want to risk changing the way she thought of him, as a result.

In the end, Wanda did write to her own mate about it. Even though there was still some question if they were there, Wanda still took comfort in confiding in them. If they weren’t there, she at least had the comfort that her written thoughts would be lost to the void, never to be found by someone who wasn’t meant to read them.

_I want a reason to say no,_ she wrote without providing any other context. _I want the fact that I’m scared to be a good enough reason. But it’s not. Even I know that. I don’t know what could happen to me, but I know we can’t go on the way we have. If nothing else will change, maybe we should. Right?_

She didn’t know what she had been hoping to accomplish with that note. Perhaps she had been making a last-ditch effort to reach out to her mate, to ask them for help, for a reason to not be so brash. For affirmation that _someone_ was there for her and wouldn’t want this for her. For a sign that this _wasn’t_ where fate wanted her.

But no one responded. No one tried to dissuade her, to emphasize how wrong the decision would be.

She decided that, in itself, to be a sign.

The next morning, she had gently shaken Pietro awake. He sat up on the sleeping mat they had shared, still groggy and disoriented from sleep when Wanda first whispered, “Let’s do it. Let’s find the laboratory.”

And with that, the twins left the only city—the only _home_ —they had ever known. With Novi Grad behind them, they ventured to the very outskirts of the country, following various (and questionably reliable) guides to find the aristocratic estate that had been converted into the science laboratory they were seeking. Eventually, they found it deep in the forest that embraced the Sokovian countryside.

The building was teeming with more of those soldiers in black padded uniforms, lurking along the shabby brick walls like ants swarming a piece of fallen food. It was a soldier who greeted the twins with hostility as they reached the entryway gates of the estate. Fortunately, Wanda had remembered the name Baron Strucker, and that was their proverbial ticket inside.

Inside the walls of the castle, they learned the scientist who had recruited them was Dr. List. Baron Strucker was the actual head of the project. He was the one who issued directions, and determined which volunteers were grouped together, and where they went, and what parts of the procedure they went through at what time. He kept track of the other volunteers by numbering them like livestock animals. And they were treated similarly, too, constantly herded into different rooms, and referred to by their numbers, and regarded as less than.

All except Pietro and Wanda. The staff members treated them differently. Not worse, and not much better, but still slightly different. They took a certain amusement, Wanda thought, out of the fact that they were the only volunteers to show up together, to be relatives. To be so insistent they stay together for every procedure because of it. The staff—particularly Baron Strucker, himself—would even refer to them as “the twins” instead of their individual numbers.

That favoritism persisted as the experiments went on. As the other volunteers gradually began to be divided into smaller groups, and then ultimately pairs. As the other volunteers began to die off. To this day, Wanda can’t account for much of that time. She only knew there were months of lab coats, and blood samples, and IVs, and physical endurance tests.

And the scepter. Oh, the scepter. With its frost-like, bluish alien energy hovering around a stone at its end. Supposedly protecting it from whoever drew near. Or whoever was forced near it, with no precautions taken to shield bare skin as that unearthly energy lashed out in defense. As it frost-burned the skin, and seeped through flesh, and then reheated the body underneath while it ran its course. Burning, distorting, and healing all within seconds at a time. It was always so much—almost too much—to bear.

But the twins survived. A cruel irony, seeing how they seemed to be the only ones prepared not to.

“Fascinating,” Baron Strucker said when he observed the results of his experiments, watching the twins writhe on the floors of their respective cells. As they struggled to physically adapt to the unnatural energies that now hovered around them like that which hovered around the stone in the scepter. A pale, slate-blue around Pietro and a vibrant, ruby-red around Wanda.

Dr. List hadn’t been quite as impressed. He was apprehensive. Wanda couldn’t see it, for she was curled in on herself too tightly, but she could _feel_ it. The first time she had ever felt someone else’s mind, though she hadn’t known that to be what it was at the time. “This is not how the enhancements were supposed to manifest.”

“I know, doctor,” Strucker had replied, still with eyes only for the people he had taken and _remade_ with an artifact that did not rightfully belong to him. That did not rightfully belong on Earth. “They are even better.”

List had made a begrudging sound. “Well, regardless, the director will want to see. He says he wants to interview any survivors from our base for compatibility with the Asset.”

Strucker had gone silent for a beat. Then he spoke again, now with a hardness in his tone. “The director will want his Asset to train them like soldiers. And these…this power is not for soldiers.”

“Sir?”

Another moment of silence. Another line of thought entering the surface of a mind. “Doctor. I want you to tell the director that there were no survivors.”

Wanda blacked out after that. However, she carried the memory of Strucker’s genuine awe with them in the days after. When the agents of the facility beat them for the first time.

Wanda had still been in the hazy portion of the experiments, continuously drifting between consciousness and not. When she awoke, she was in one of the labs used for physical examinations. She rolled over on her table, still groggy and with bones still aching, to find Pietro struggling against a pair of soldiers. List was moving as if to leave the room just as Strucker entered, both of them bearing expressions of frustration that usually came from a minor inconvenience.

It hadn’t been minor to Pietro, though. He was clawing at the soldiers attempting to hold him down, his body wracked with tremors, with the first hints of the spontaneous kinetic energy that would allow him to move at the speeds he eventually would. He was reaching for whatever List was about to carry out of the room with him. When List turned to explain the situation to Strucker, Wanda had gotten a better view of what was in his hand. It was a spiral notebook, bright with its light blue cover, unlike the dusty brown books the scientists used.

It was from Pietro’s mate.

“Just let me read one,” he had begged. “I want to know she’s alright—”

“We can’t let them have contact with foreign commodities,” List had been telling Strucker at the same time. “It could interfere with the alien properties’ integration in their systems.”

Strucker had nodded in agreement. “Very well. As future assets, they will need to learn to reject material possessions that may compromise them or a mission anyways.”

The declaration seemed to summon another pair of soldiers at that very moment. They abandoned their attempts to simply get Pietro onto the examination table beside his sister’s, and looked to be herding him out of the room altogether, through the door to the hallway that led to their cells. Pietro only fought harder, stubbornness still clearly set in his bones and desperation to stay connected to his mate—even as small a piece as one of her lost notebooks—driving him. That was when the soldiers turned to more belligerent methods, their fear of strangeness manifesting into physical force as Pietro’s speed began to stir into being, blurring the very sight of him.

Wanda remembered recognizing when he was struck. She remembered the sharp thought of _no! Don’t touch him!_ cutting through her disorientation, startling her to full wakefulness. She remembered anger clouding her mind, blinding her to the fact that a cloud of tangible red burst out of her form. A blood-red colored explosion, knocking agents and equipment and even Dr. List and the Baron into the walls.

But not her brother. Never Pietro. Even when her powers were new to her, reacting to every subconscious whim, she wouldn’t let them hurt her kin, her _only_ companion for the past fifteen years. Instead, he collapsed on the floor the moment the soldiers holding him were thrown off. Wanda had been across the room in a heartbeat, sliding onto her knees and curling around him, tucking her brother’s head and as much of his torso as would fit against her stomach. Shielding him. _Cursing_ him under her breath, because she didn’t have a mate of her own to help her understand why it mattered so much to hear from one after months of silence.

“You’re so stupid. You’re so _fucking_ stupid. You don’t ever _listen._ ”

_I don’t want you to get hurt,_ she meant. _Not for her. Not for a connection I can’t understand, myself._

“Get off,” Pietro bit back. It wasn’t until too late that Wanda realized it was because he could see what was coming behind her. “Get up!”

A thick-gloved hand gripped the back of the nightgown they had given her for the experiments, and they hauled her off of her brother. They managed to throw her on the floor on the other side of the entryway only because of the sheer surprise of it. Even then, her scarlet fought them off for her. A wisp of it coiled upwards until it had wrapped around the agent that had grabbed her, throwing them by their own arm. Unfortunately, she was still too caught off-guard from getting thrown to even think of summoning her newfound powers again, to channel them towards the other three agents as they swarmed her. As one held her down while the others rushed past her to hold Pietro down. As one jabbed a stun baton into her side, its end crackling with electricity.

Wanda had been used to pain. Had endured it almost regularly in the days leading up to that moment. But feeling electricity course through her was new. It was so biting and unexpected, its heat through her system so much more like a sudden bite of jagged teeth than the slow spread of fire she had grown accustomed to from the alien energy that had forced its way through her blood. When the sensation was joined by her anxiety that they would put Pietro through the same thing, she became overwhelmed and fainted, just as they wanted her to.

When she came to again, she was back in her cell. Back on the floor, curled up in front of the massive window for showcasing her to Dr. List and the Baron. They were standing close together, speaking in hushed voices.

“…to find another way to guarantee compliance,” Strucker was insisting, his tone pinched. “Pierce’s methods are flawed. That is why he has only one functional Soldier.”

“We can still get some use out of them,” List argued. “Cryogenic freezing has allowed the Asset’s handlers to find and keep track of everything his mate loses to him. Perhaps, in the event of another incident, we could put them under, too.”

“And how long until we could get two chambers here?”

“It would take a week for both to be shipped over from Siberia.”

Despite still feeling an unnatural, heated warmth flowing through her veins, Wanda had shivered. She knew what cryogenic freezing meant. She knew what _chambers_ meant. Being shut up and stored away like mere objects that had no use anymore. Being trapped in a tight, enclosed space. One not unlike the collapsed building that had trapped them in their parents’ death for two days. This time without each other for company, for _sanity._

She couldn’t bear that. She needed Pietro. In that moment, she needed Pietro. She dug her scarlet-glowing fingertips into the rough cement beneath her and dragged herself forward, closer to the wall that kept her apart from her brother. She pressed her palm against it and sought out her brother with a power she barely remembered she had now, let alone understood enough to fully control. No visible tendril of scarlet escaped her fingertips, but in her mind, she could feel it reaching out, extending past her just as viscerally as she had felt the explosive ones in the laboratory, albeit slower and more careful this time. When it brushed against something, she could feel the phantom sensation of touch against her fingertips. Could vaguely hear the whispers of thoughts and emotions whose patterns she had known since birth.

“Pietro?” she had whispered aloud, not realizing how faint her voice had become from screaming as she’d been electrocuted.

_Please, hear me Pietro,_ she had thought in frustration with her abused, barely-audible voice.

Something rang down the invisible sample of her powers she had sent to him. His thoughts, sounding like his voice speaking in her own mind. _Wanda?_

“Wanda?” he asked externally a second later. _I can hear you. Where are you? Are you alright?_

Wanda sagged in relief. He sounded half-sick with worry, but otherwise, like he was fine. Like her condition was of greater worry for him.

They hadn’t harmed him the way they had her.

Wanda revelled in her alleviation a heartbeat more before sending the reassuring thought of, _Yes, I’m fine,_ through the mental bridge she had built. A connection _she_ had forged all on her own with her new enhancements. A connection as clear and strong as the ones she imagined fate itself created between soulmates.

Was that why she had no mate of her own? Was this power what her soul had really been missing, had been longing for over the past two and a half decades of her life? The ability to make her own connections to the souls that mattered most to her, at her choosing?

Pietro’s next thought entered her mind, pushing aside her own thoughts and speculation. _Wanda, what is this?_

She didn’t know how to explain it to him. She merely shook her head, even though he couldn’t see that through their mental link. _Whatever they were trying to do here. It worked. I…I feel changed. I have_ powers.

As Pietro sent another thought back to her, she noticed he didn’t sound nearly as awed as she did. He sounded uncertain and anxious. A startling role reversal from the night they first contemplated coming here in search of this. _I changed, too. I can’t stop running. Wanda…I can’t stop._

Pietro’s fear bled into her own heart. She’d always known him as her cocky, unphasable brother. To think of him afraid of anything felt unnatural, even more so than the physical enhancements that now haunted their very beings.

In her distress, her frail bridge into Pietro’s mind disappeared. Again, she hadn’t been able to see it, but she could feel it like a tangible thing at her fingers, falling away like sand between the digits. In its dissipation, real-world sounds returned to her, starting with List’s voice.

“—will need something to train them, so that they may go up against Stark’s team of—”

Something from deep within the recesses of Wanda’s repressed memories sprung into the light at that name, prompting her to half-sit up despite her exhausted state. “Stark?”

List immediately went silent, and Strucker’s eye (the one she could see without the glare of the lights overhead reflecting in his other one’s monocle) blinked in surprise.

“Do you recognize that name?” the Baron had asked. He stepped closer to the glass of Wanda’s cell, his voice shifting to an artificial lightness, as if speaking to an animal he didn’t think would fully understand. “Do you know it belongs to the creator of the weapons that have kept your city in the state it is in for the past twenty years?”

She did know. The use of such weaponry in civilian populated areas had been what she and Pietro had been protesting when they were first offered to volunteer here. She had been unable to scrape that name from her memory—from her _nightmares_ —ever since seeing it painted on the bomb that nearly killed them when they were trapped in the rubble of their parents’ demolished home. And she knew Pietro remembered it, too. She could sense it when he had nightmares, just like her. She could hear it in the sudden shift in his thoughts to a dark grey anger, visible only to her at the surface of his mind. She could even see it in the way Strucker glanced to his left, into Pietro’s cell beside her.

Strucker had smirked. Wanda could see in his mind, see the cloud of satisfaction that grew as he realized he had found a way into gaining the twins’ compliance. Something to motivate them into continuing whatever work he still wanted from them.

Wanda sought out her brother’s mind again, forging another mental bridge into it. This time stronger, now that she knew what it was. This time, it would last for good.

_We will take revenge on Stark,_ she sent to him. _And then we will come back here, for_ them.

She saw images in Pietro’s mind. Images of herself convulsing on the floor from being electrocuted as he was held down, unable to stop it. She saw the first traces of notes in his mate’s neat, cursive handwriting before they were each snatched away. She saw herself and him both in pain, contorted and burning from the inside out as they were enveloped by a blue, alien light on their respective operating tables in their assigned laboratory. And she saw the dark grey of his anger turn into a shining silver of determination and agreement.

And so, another several months passed with the twins still there, at Strucker’s base. They operated under a charade of acquiescence to him, dedicating their entire beings into learning to tame their powers in the controlled shelter of his facility. All the while, they were secretly waiting for the day he would take them to the Avengers, so that they could carry out the first stage of their revenge plot. Then they would turn on him. Him and List both, they decided sometime later, when the doctor continued to suggest using cryo-chambers to subdue them whenever they lost control of their powers in moments of mistake.

In the end, however, the Avengers had come to them. By then, the twins’ “good behavior” and the death of the director Strucker and List deferred to (whom they had been keeping the continuation of their experiments a secret from) had earned them some privileges around the base. Said privileges included being allowed out of their cells to take shelter with Strucker and List in one of the lower floors of the castle during the Avengers’ raid, despite not being considered “field ready” yet. All they’d needed was a moment—one single second—of both men turning their backs on them for Pietro to carry them away with his speed. And from there, their pursuit for vengeance was finally set in motion.

The plan didn’t go according to Wanda’s original vision. Then again, few things ever did.

The AI wasn’t what Wanda had in mind when she’d let Stark go, leaving him to go make his fears manifest on his own. But Ultron killed Strucker for them, and wanted to challenge his creator, and that had been enough of a common ground for her. She, and Pietro following her, morphed the rest of their plan around his, even while only knowing what he’d wanted them to know.

Wanda recognized their mistake in an instant. She recognized _her_ mistake in letting Stark create the rogue AI the instant she made a second attempt at reading his mind by reading the synthetic body he was trying to create for himself. She realized the full extent of his intended destruction, how he didn’t want to stop at just the Avengers’ team. He wanted to see the annihilation of _everything._

Pietro recognized the mistake at the same time she did, through the telepathic bridge she had maintained between them. When Ultron confirmed out loud that he had no intention of letting human civilization stay alive, the twins fled. Pietro had managed to carry his sister halfway back to Sokovia when Wanda sent through their mental link a request to stop, to think. They did just that for only a few precious minutes of tranquility, then ultimately decided they needed to go back and find Ultron again. This time, to stand against him. To stand, instead, with the only other people capable of stopping him. His creators. The Avengers.

Their alliance with the team of other enhanced persons was shaky at first. Uncertain and begrudging for both parties, but all tension was thankfully put aside in favor of defeating Ultron in time. In favor of saving Sokovia, and its people, and its neighbors. To save the country the twins had called home.

But they couldn’t save each other.

Wanda felt it when her brother was torn away from her. She felt the sting of every bullet that ripped through skin, the burn of lungs filling with blood, of a heart stuttering in confusion as it straddled the plane of life and death for a scant few seconds. She felt it all through the mental bridge with her brother before said bridge went slack, and then collapsed into nothingness as easily as a house of cards.

The nothingness that followed was the most painful part. It was a pain unlike anything. Harder to bear than the stun batons, the experiments, the nights with only morsels lost by Pietro’s mate to eat. She couldn’t stop herself from bowing beneath the weight of it, falling to her knees with a scream and a tide of scarlet.

That feeling of nothingness stayed with her. It stayed with her as she took vengeance on the monster that took him from her, ripping the closest thing it had to a heart out of its vibranium chest. That nothingness stayed with her as the Avengers took her back to America with them when she expressed no interest in preserving herself in the aftermath of the battle, let alone when the Sokovian government exiled her for her part in it (both for causing it and for encouraging a foreign party’s interference in it). That nothingness stayed with her as the Avengers debated what to do with her while she was waiting in the next room, unable to go elsewhere in Stark Tower because the majority of its systems were still closed off to be cleared of Ultron’s influence.

It was a full day later when Wanda caught herself slowly slipping into a catatonic state. She realized it when the Black Widow spy— _Natasha—_ approached her with her first decision to make since leaving Sokovia.

“We have another facility. Technically, it’s still under construction, but it will be ready and operable sooner than this place will be. There can be a room there that’s yours, but only if you want it. Only if you’re comfortable staying with us.”

Again, it was the first time in twenty-four hours that Wanda had been presented with a decision to make herself. However, she’d known there was no actual choice to be made. Her brother was gone. Her former home had rejected her. She had no mate to find. She had nowhere to go, except with whoever was willing to take her.

So, she went with the Avengers. She stayed in one of their facility’s common rooms until a proper bedroom was ready. And she was allowed to live there at the price of an agreement to serve with them again as a new member of their team.

It had taken a week for her room to be ready, for her to be able to move into what would be her home for the next year. In that week, cleanup had begun in Sokovia, complete with SHIELD-issued aid (the _real_ SHIELD. Not Hydra’s deceivers like Baron Strucker and Dr. List). That meant SHIELD was able to ship whatever they could find that belonged to the Avengers back to them overseas.

Wanda had been milling about in her new room when Natasha came by with something that SHIELD had shipped over for her. It was the black and white track jacket Pietro had worn before the Battle of Sokovia.

“We figured you would want to keep it,” Natasha had explained simply as she handed the lump of abandoned fabric to the Maximoff sister.

Wanda accepted it without thinking. For a long heartbeat, that numbness that had been following her since her twin’s death returned full-force as her mind tried to process what it meant for _her_ to have Pietro’s jacket. The jacket he had left on the quinjet before the battle. The jacket he had _lost_ when he couldn’t come back for it.

No one else had found it. That meant no one else had been _there_ to find it.

Pietro’s mate had died, too.

Rationally speaking, her death could have easily happened sometime before then. From how different her life was (the way she wrote to him and the different quality of the things she would lose), it was fair to believe she hadn’t even been near Sokovia at any point in the past. Not to mention, so much of the twins’ time in Hydra had blurred in Wanda’s memory that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Pietro find something from his mate. He and Wanda both hadn’t had any possessions of their own during that time to lose to their respective mates, let alone for their mates to be prompted to reply to. Perhaps it had been why Pietro was so adamant to read the notes he’d found that day they had been beaten by Hydra’s soldiers.

But in that moment, when Wanda’s grief for him and her guilt for the battle that killed him were so fresh, she couldn’t help but feel as though Pietro’s mate had somehow died directly with him, perhaps even somewhere else in the Battle of Sokovia. The battle that had started because of Ultron, a creation she had allowed into being because she’d wanted revenge on Stark. The battle that had killed her brother, and now possibly his mate—her only family left, through him—and it had all been _her fault._

For the second time in recent memory, Wanda’s knees buckled under the weight of grief. This time, Natasha was there to catch her. The spy got her arms around her and stumbled to the floor with her as Wanda crushed the jacket to her chest, mourning her brother’s mate. Subsequently mourning her brother, as well, all over again.

“Alright,” Natasha had whispered, clearly at a loss for how else to comfort someone in such a state when she wasn’t accustomed to expressions of vulnerability in herself.

The spy awkwardly repeated her soft, “alright” over and over, curling around the other woman in a manner so much like Wanda had when she’d tried to shield Pietro from Hydra’s soldiers. It had only made Wanda feel worse, unable to keep from remembering her time there with her brother. How much he had survived, only to be killed the way he had been days after they finally escaped. How he had run off, leaving her sight for just a couple minutes, to get more people to safety. To get himself _killed_ like the idiot he was. Like a brash and foolhardy martyr. Like—like…

Like a hero.

Natasha stayed with her through the worst of her fit. Or at least, what she thought to be the worst of it. Wanda stifled as much of her sobs as possible, letting only a few escape her in relentless, shuddering gasps. It was difficult for her, letting her innermost emotions and distress be laid bare around a presence that was still unfamiliar to her. Perhaps it was fate’s way of balance, after Wanda had forced a similar unveiling of demons for Natasha just weeks before, while still following Ultron’s command. Wanda had seen Natasha’s memories of losing her own family (or at least, the family the spy could still remember. A group of people that had been hers in everything but blood, until she left them behind to escape the horrors of the Red Room and join SHIELD). And so, Nataha had been sent to sit with Wanda as she processed the loss of her last two strands of family.

Nevertheless, it was an uncomfortable moment for them both. And that tension, having become mixed with Wanda’s already existing upset, sparked into something heated when the Maximoff sister was eventually left to her own devices again. A thick balloon of anger, outweighing even her sorrow as she stewed more and more on how much she despised the fact that her brother had left her, even though he knew she would be all alone without him. How he knew he would be breaking his promise to look after her.

Her grief became too much. Even simply holding her brother’s jacket—her last link to him—to her chest felt like too much. It was too much of a reminder that he was gone, that _his mate_ was gone, and that it meant she was completely alone. She didn’t want that reminder. She didn’t want anything to do with her now late brother at all.

She roughly balled up the track jacket and went to the window in her room that faced the woods surrounding the facility building. Without truly thinking anything of it, she managed to stretch up and force it open just wide enough to stuff the black and white fabric between the opening and the wall beneath it. She then tossed it as far as she could manage with the window stubbornly trying to fall back closed, and then ripped herself away from that side of the bedroom altogether.

She tried to not even think of it—of _anything_ that had happened in the past few weeks—for the rest of the evening, and instead buried it beneath mundane tasks like learning the halls of her new home and cooking dinner with Steve, Sam, and Natasha (who thankfully acted as though her last exchange with the witch hadn’t happened at all).

It wasn’t until early the next morning, as she was waking up from an empty sleep, that Wanda realized how irrational she had been. That she realized what she had _done._ She scrambled back to the window, stretching up to look through it, even though a part of her already knew her brother’s jacket would be gone. After all, she had thrown it away. She had purposely wanted to forget she even had it. She had lost it.

That meant either someone else had found it, or the void had simply absorbed it for no one to find again.

Wanda couldn’t bear to think the latter was true. To think she had erased what little remained of her brother from existence… _that_ was too much.

She went to the desk by her bedroom door and impulsively began to write a note to her mate. If they were there, if they had the jacket…she had to know. She had to know _someone_ had it, and would keep it safe, that last tangible reminder that her brother had lived. She had to.

_I hope you’re out there,_ she wrote with a pen and notepad paper that had been on the desk when she first arrived. _I suppose it would be just my luck to be mateless. But I really hope you have the jacket. It wasn’t mine to lose. It was my brother’s. I tried to throw it away because I was mad at him for leaving me. I shouldn’t have. I wish I hadn’t. Will you keep it safe for me? Please?_

She went to that same window overlooking the surrounding woodlands and tossed the note to the wind. Hoping against hope it would find its way down the same path the jacket had, to an actual person who would read it and honor her wishes. Though given how one-sided her relationship with her mate had been thus far, even in her desperately hopeful state, she still surrendered to the idea that she would never actually know what they did with her lost belongings.

Again, she spent the rest of her day trying to escape her own thoughts by immersing herself in mindless tasks around the facility. Cleaned the unused, already spotless common rooms. Helped Steve and Natasha organize files for old and new SHIELD cases alike in Steve’s office. Helped Sam cook dinner for the team again. It got her mind off of her own life for a while. But of course, she could only go so long making herself of use to the others. Eventually, she had to go back to her own space, back to her own thoughts.

When she did return to her room, she didn’t immediately notice anything different. It was so small and so plain that it blended against the surface of the notepad on her equally plain desk, evading her attention. It wasn’t until she went back to the door to close it, as an afterthought, did she notice something on the desk beside it. She noticed something written on a shred of paper that was barely half the size of the rest of the notepad paper there. A note written in rushed, jagged strokes.

_It’s safe_.

She knew it wasn’t from anyone one the Avengers team. She had seen Steve and Natasha’s handwriting earlier, while helping them sort case reports in the Captain’s office. Sam and Tony were away with their mates, with Tony even staying with his in their shared personal home for the night, and most likely the foreseeable future.

_I really hope you have the jacket,_ she had written the last time she was at this desk. _Will you keep it safe for me?_

_It’s safe,_ someone had responded. Someone had responded to a note to her mate.

She sank into the desk chair numbly, as if it were a tub full of ice water. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t _think._

Her soulmate. She had a soulmate.

She felt a knot rise in her throat. Tears gathered in her eyes. Tears she couldn’t explain. They spilled over into silent sobs as she hunched over her desk to read that plain, simple note for the umpteenth time. Was she relieved to be proven right about her mate’s existence? Was she upset they had never responded to her before?

In a way, that didn’t matter. The only question she truly wanted answered was _why._

_Why now? Out of all the times I needed you—and_ told _you I needed someone—why now? Why now, when it’s too late to change a damn thing that’s happened? When I have nothing left to give you?_

_Why have you never wanted me?_

If her mate didn’t want her, she could understand it now. Her name and her face were still on numerous news channels and articles the world over. From the way she had written to her mate in the past, back when she was only half-sure they were even there, let alone would find her someday, it wouldn’t have taken them much to notice the similarities to herself in recent news coverage. The same stories that raised harsh questions about her, like whether she should be considered a threat to society because of her enhancements or a terrorist for co-conspiring with Ultron to attack Sokovia (even though she had actually fought against him when he tried to take their fight to her homeland). She could understand trying to ignore her now, trying to avoid any sort of connection to her now.

But before? When she was just a child, not yet scarred by human experimentation or the loss of her parents? What had she done wrong?

_“There is_ nothing _wrong with her,”_ her father had said long ago. _“If anything, it must be her mate. There must be something wrong with them.”_

_What, Papa?_ she wished she could ask him now. _What could possibly happen to someone that they didn’t lose anything to their mate for so many years?_

In that moment, she was too low to consider answers to such things. Her heartbreak from how much she had lost—now literally everything, including her own brother—was too raw to invite reason. Her emotions were stronger. Her _anger_ was stronger, fueled by wounded pride to have been ignored for so long by someone who had now been confirmed as being there all along.

_“Fate puts us where we’re meant to be.”_

_No. My mate put me here when they ignored me._

Why would fate be so insistent she suffered this way? Her pain, and miseries, and calls for help. They had all gone ignored. Her own mate had ignored her all this time. And she hated them for it.

The moment it crossed her mind, Wanda immediately banished the thought. She couldn’t hate her mate. Hating one’s mate was considered obscene. She remembered how her parents, in particular, held soulmates at an almost godlike regard. How they made their children’s soulmates out to be guides, guards, and companions for a life outside of Sokovia. A life better than what their parents could provide. Someone who was supposed to understand them the way no one else would, and still love them for it. And for that, Wanda was meant to love her mate in return, the same way. After all, fate had connected them to each other for _some_ reason.

So, no, she didn’t hate them. She realized that she truly couldn’t, because they had Pietro’s jacket. She had asked them to keep it safe for her, and they had promised it would be. She couldn’t deny that she was grateful for that. That it made her relieved beyond compare. In spite of all the things she still wanted to ask now that she knew her mate was real, that was the only thing she knew she _had to_ tell them. So, she wrote a new note on the now tear-stained notepad, tore it free from its binds, and went back to the window, dropping the two simple words to the wind.

_Thank you._

That night, she fell asleep to a torrent of thoughts about her mate still rolling through her mind. When she awoke, her more emotionally charged questions for them had finally abated some, allowing reason to take shape in her mind. There could have been a number of reasons her mate had been silent thus far. Perhaps they were more like her than she’d previously thought, having had to live with nothing to call theirs for all that time. Just as she had lived for a time between each foster home. For the time she had spent in Hydra.

She wouldn’t wish any sort of desolate lifestyle like that on anyone.

She went back to the desk in her room, and she wrote another short note. Just a few more things she felt her soulmate had to know.

_I guess you figured out who I am. I understand now why you don’t want me. But I’m glad you’re alright, at least. And that I haven’t been talking to no one this whole time._

She went to the window and tossed the scrap of paper to the wind before she could think to add anything else. Before she could address why her mate may not have wanted her.

_I’m not what everyone else is saying about me. I promise, I’m still who I was before the experiments. I’m still…me. At least, I think I am._

In time, she became grateful she didn’t send that part. If her mate truly believed the news coverage about her, she figured they wouldn’t take such words at just face value. If she wanted her mate to believe she was still someone worth being tethered to during whatever was happening that left them without any belongings of their own to lose, then she would have to show them.

Her first thought had been food. Mostly because it was the only thing she could claim as hers at the compound, and was thus most guaranteed to be sent to her mate if she lost it. They didn’t respond to any more of her notes, so she wasn’t able to learn more about their situation, let alone whatever needs they may still have. So, she deferred to basic food items. Things that were practical in most situations. Preserved foods like crackers, or pretzels, or candies. Sometimes bottles of water. Things she could easily tell the team she was saving for herself for later, and then innocuously forget she had set down somewhere between the common room and her bedroom. Small things for her mate to know she was thinking of them. That she hoped they would still be alright, safe from whatever prevented them from reaching back to her before. And whatever kept them from reaching back to her in the days that followed.

As the days translated into weeks, and then months, Wanda continued to deliberately lose things for her mate to find. At the same time, she began training with the Avengers, fully adapting to being a member of their team. Gradually, she began to integrate into their off-duty camaraderie, as well. Which meant gaining more access to the team’s allowance through Stark. Granted, she did use some of those funds for herself, since it had been so long since she’d had _any_ choice in what she got to wear or keep for use in her spare time. Some of those belongings she lost by honest accident. Benign things she didn’t care to keep track of, like hair ties or nail polish bottles.

However, she also used her new allowance to buy more things for her mate. More basic items that she figured could be used for whatever reason. A spare blanket, some spare socks, another jacket (which she could only hope fit them). Once, she even lost a stuffed bear for them. Steve had won it for her when he and Natasha took her to Coney Island for “team bonding” outside of the compound once post-Ultron public hysteria quieted down for a while. It was meant to be an inside joke between them, given how the bear’s microfiber pelt was patterned after Captain America’s suit, but on a nostalgic whim, Wanda decided to leave it behind in Natasha’s car on the way back to the compound. She had been thinking of the last stuffed bear she had, the one her parents had given her when she was too young to remember, and how ruined it had become when it was lost to her mate. She hoped the new one made up for it. Perhaps, deep down, she had been seeking to make up for losing everything she had that day. It had been _so much,_ and she still wondered what it had been like to receive it all at once.

Months bled into each other, one after the other, with that system. Training with the Avengers, subsequently bonding with them while off-duty, and spending her personal downtime finding things to lose for her mate. It never felt like home, per se (it never would, without Pietro), but she was content with the stability. She and her new mentors genuinely warmed up to each other, and even when her duties to their team felt like too much, she had another task to keep busy with. Her mate continued to be unresponsive, so she had no way of knowing whether the things she sent them were of any actual use to them, but she enjoyed thinking they were. While she no longer confided in them in written notes, it was still cathartic to know for certain now that someone was on the other end of their bond. Another constant companion, in her brother’s stead, for her to share what little possessions she found for herself.

Before she knew it, an entire year had passed since she joined the Avengers and confirmed her mate existed. By then, reducing her life to just those two things earned her a place in the field when the Avengers were working on a new case in Lagos, Nigeria. It was originally meant to be a hands-on test of sorts for her, to see how well she could apply what they’d taught her to a real-world, low stakes mission. A simple investigation for leads on an illegal arms-dealing case. None of them expected it to become as involved as it did.

Wanda did what she could with the mission as it escalated to a violent confrontation with terrorists that had been in the middle of their own operation. To make matters worse, their leader apparently had a personal vendetta against Steve. Later on, he would blame that for the way the mission ended. When he missed the bomb hidden in Rumlow’s vest, causing Wanda to impulsively try containing it in her scarlet. An attempt to keep civilians safe from the subsequent explosion that had gone in vain.

She would later come to appreciate the Captain’s efforts to lessen her guilt. But on that initial flight home, those feelings were too strong to really let his words have any impact. It wasn’t until she noticed the shock she was slipping into after seeing so many civilians die in a fight initiated by the Avengers and herself—more innocent deaths in the same vein as Pietro and possibly his mate—was starting to become reminiscent of the dangerously low nothingness she’d felt after the Battle of Sokovia that she properly tuned in to Steve’s quiet words to Natasha as the spy sat beside Wanda at the back of the quinjet.

“It was on me,” the Captain told his partner in an apologetic tone. “I didn’t think he would…he brought up Bucky. And what they did to him.”

Bucky Barnes. A friend Steve had known back in his own time. The man who had become the Winter Soldier. Or as Wanda had known him, _the_ Asset of Hydra that she and Pietro were meant to rival after their experiments there concluded. Though, she didn’t mention that to either of her mentors as they explained his significance to them, since there was an unspoken agreement among them to not mention Wanda’s time there, after Wanda found out the subgroup’s true, parasitic purpose within SHIELD.

The topic of Barnes, and the team’s failed mission as a whole, wouldn’t resurface until days later, after their collective shock from it all had settled some, leaving them to cope with the public fallout from it. Steve tried again to alleviate as much of her guilt as he could, insisting that he should have been more perceptive, that he should have not let the mere mention of his old friend distract him. She did appreciate his comfort more then, although it was soon of little importance compared to the ordeal their entire team was brought into by the Sokovia Accords.

Wanda knew what the Accords were really about. They were about keeping her, and other enhanced persons like her, contained. To prevent another instance like the Battle of Sokovia or the bombing in Lagos. She could understand the call for such a thing, but Steve insisted it wasn’t necessary. That it wasn’t worth her using her individual agency. She wasn’t so sure if she agreed (at least, not when the losses suffered in Lagos were still so fresh in mind), though she was still affronted when Tony tried to keep her on lockdown there at the Avengers’ Facility. Affronted, but not willing to do anything at the moment to fight it, considering the amount of support shown to the Accords. The amount of people that wanted her subdued, because they feared her capacity for destruction…perhaps being stored away where she couldn’t cause more problems _was_ best.

It did, however, bother her to think being restricted to the Facility would mean she wouldn’t be able to go out and get more things for her mate. It had become a part of her new routine, and she was worried of what her mate would think if she suddenly stopped. That first night she found out about her being put under lockdown, she tried to explain what was to come while also keeping details to a minimum, so as not to make the situation seem bigger than she wanted it to be. At least, not to her mate.

_Some things have come up,_ she wrote. _I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I do know I won’t have anything to lose for a while. I hope that’s ok._

She propped open the window in her bedroom and dropped the note into the evening air. And with that, she surrendered to the notion that she would be confined to the grounds for the foreseeable future.

That is, until later that same night, when Clint came for her. He convinced her to flee not only the compound, but the entire country, so that they could help their Captain and his old friend, Barnes. Admittedly, Wanda didn’t entirely know what she was getting into, but somehow, Clint convinced her that getting off her ass was the best way to help her team. To help a man who, according to Steve, never had a choice in this life he had been thrown into. By helping keep him safe, she would be doing the right thing.

Clint was giving her more of the details of the UN bombing and how Steve had convinced him that the Winter Soldier— _former_ Winter Soldier—needed their help during a drive out of New York, to find someone that Sam knew was adept at sneaking items (and hopefully, people, too) out of place and was willing to follow their lead. Just as they reached their new ally’s home, Wanda found something in the pocket of her jacket. It was a small scrap of paper, with vaguely familiar handwriting scribbled over it.

Another note from her soulmate. The first she’d heard from them since the previous year.

_Just be safe. I’m sorry I couldn’t reach you before._

She kept the note hidden in her pocket over the next leg of their journey, on the flight to meet Steve and Sam overseas. She mulled over its message the entire way. Partially to keep her mind off of herself and the consequences she could face for violating her house arrest. But also, because she was overwhelmingly curious over what it meant.

Her soulmate _did_ care about her. Something _had_ been keeping them from responding to her before. It had to be serious if it had silenced them for at least two decades of life. She still had no clue what it could have been, but it did make her reconsider all the time she spent frustrated and even angry with them. She didn’t know what to think of them anymore.

What she did know, however, was that she still wanted to be a worthwhile mate for them. Someone they wouldn’t be ashamed to be tethered to, in spite of what the rest of the world probably told them about her. So, she decided to stand by what she thought was the right thing to do. To see her mission to help Steve and his friend to its end. To prove she wasn’t an animal that needed to be caged at the Avengers’ Facility.

It wasn’t until after they met with Steve and Sam at the airport in Leipzig that some of her confidence wavered again. When they encountered Tony and Natasha as well. It felt wrong to go up against their teammate and her other mentor, but she managed to work past it by focusing her attention on the reinforcements they had brought.

Wanda didn’t know the spiderling, but they kept each other occupied for a majority of the fight. However, there was a brief moment where she was distracted. It must have been the extreme emotions of either the Panther or the Soldier, for her telepathy’s ear tuned into one of them at a random moment during the scuffle, when the two men were still locked in their own personal brawl, far from everyone else. Far from any _help_ as the Panther managed to pin Barnes against some abandoned equipment. Wanda couldn’t see exactly what the Panther was poised to do, but she knew from the darker, more heated emotions that had been radiating off of him the entire time, that it was something meant to inflict serious damage. Maybe even kill the Soldier, as the Wakandan king’s father had been killed by whomever had framed Barnes for the bombing that had happened in Vienna.

Something fierce, bordering on feral, rose within her.

_No! Not him!_ She had _not_ come all this way to help her captain just for his friend to get killed here!

The witch’s scarlet reacted before she could even think to summon it. It launched her a good several feet across the tarmac, only for her to be grounded by last-minute doubt of her abilities to reach them in time. She hastily landed while still several feet away, leaving her to rely on her scarlet to stop the Panther’s hand before it could wrap around Barnes’s throat. She then threw him as far as she could manage with her psionic grip, grunting at the effort and wincing a little as her scarlet clung to the Panther even as he crashed through a boarding bridge, sending a jolt of phantom pain down her back through the red wisps still tethered to her.

In those first few seconds after the exchange had ended, that protective fervor within her lingered. She didn’t think much of it, instead used it to keep momentum as she rushed back towards the main fray. Her goal had been to reach the hanger where the quinjet she, Clint, and Scott had taken was hidden, even though her teammates had already accepted that they would have to stay behind in order to keep the others busy long enough for their Captain and Barnes to make it out. She was so desperate to make it there herself—so desperate to continue being of help—that she hadn’t even thought to use her scarlet again until later, in another moment of primal impulsivity. She stopped dead in her tracks as more equipment began to collapse right in front of the hanger’s opening, nearly crushing Steve and Barnes. Her scarlet managed to envelop it in time, but at the price of her having to stay behind with her other teammates, after all.

She had helped Steve and Barnes get away. That’s all that truly mattered. At least, that’s what she told herself afterwards. After Colonel Rhodes had immobilized her with a sonic blast from his suit, rattling her very _brain_ until she was so disorientated that him arresting her had felt like a hazy dream. By the time her senses had cleared, law enforcement had arrived. Seeing how she was already in proverbial hot water for breaking her not-yet-official house arrest, she thought it best to be compliant and nonthreatening, so as to not push her luck with any further. Little did she know, it wouldn’t make any difference. The public’s mind had already been made up about her.

Interpol took her and her other teammates (sans Natasha, who had disappeared in true master spy fashion, and Tony, who had been cooperative during the entire Accords ordeal) to a prison building known as the Raft. A mysterious, maximum security, _underwater_ prison. She immediately hated it because of the implications behind that. A maxed out prison in the middle of an ocean, hidden from the public eye and thus, free from any repercussions if anything happened to the prisoners inside… It made her uneasy.

Her apprehension had come with good reason. Once their belongings had been confiscated, her teammates were treated like normal inmates, simply put into separate cells in a circular room that was generally small, but kept the cells large enough for them to be unable to see each other within their respective spaces. But the witch was given a different treatment. Obviously because she _wasn’t_ a normal prisoner. She was feared because of her enhancements, which were a part of her, and couldn’t just be stored away like the others’ suits and equipment. She was, as a whole, deemed a weapon. A weapon that had to be neutralized.

The U.S. Secretary of State, who was apparently the head of operations there, chose bodily restraints as a solution. A straitjacket and shock collar. At first, she tried to deny the latter was there. But that became impossible once she was led into her cell, and the damn thing was activated at the first sign of independent movement from her.

The sensation of the shock collar coursing through her body triggered the exact memory she had feared it would. In fact, it made the memory of being shocked by Hydra’s stun batons even worse, as they flashed through her mind while her present self felt a separate pain, the bolts of electricity centralized at the sensitive skin of her throat. Granted, the collar’s shocks lasted for a shorter period of time, but she wound up receiving them more often in a vicious cycle of an initial shock, a panicked response to the flashback it provoked in her mind, and the triggering of another shock in a twisted attempt to make her settle down.

A bolt of electricity. A bolt of terror. A bolt of electricity. Over and over and _over_ again.

Eventually, she exhausted herself to the point of simply collapsing against a wall in her cell, staring listlessly ahead as her mind continued to flit between the memories of her last place of imprisonment and her current one. Even when the jolts of electricity ceased, she could still feel the burning ache in her throat and in her blood, as her scarlet tried to lash out while it was effectively restricted within the straitjacket, unable to harm its host. It was burning. Stinging. Suffocating.

The physical and mental stress of it all muddied her senses, making present time feel unreal again. She lost track of where she was. Who she was with. What she had done to earn such grueling punishments.

She wanted to leave. She wanted to leave Hydra. She wanted to leave General Ross’s prison. She wanted to lay down and sleep forever.

She wanted her brother. She wanted to admit their mistake in coming here and ask for Pietro take her home. There was a muzzy moment where she thought he had come for her, as the door to her left raised a scarce few inches, and an arm poked through. Fingers hooked around a strap to the frumpy brown backpack that was sitting under the small metal table beside her, slowly dragging it away like an animal with a stolen scrap of food. Wanda idly watched, too pained and too spent to question what was happening.

She wanted to ask if Pietro had asked his mate to send them supplies. She wanted to ask what exactly they were. But her throat was too worn out to compose the words, and her mind was too scrambled to retain the memory altogether. Within minutes, she completely forgot the exchange even happened.

Her mind continued to drift that way for hours. Quite possibly a day or two. Food was left out for her a couple of times, but she was too afraid of receiving more shocks to even acknowledge it. She simply sat in place and stared at a wall. She thought of her brother. She thought of her teammates. She thought of her mate. Of the unofficial promise she had made to all of them.

_I’m not what they think I am. I’m not what they tried to turn me into. I’m still me._

As stubbornly as she held onto those thoughts, a shade of doubt still crept in. Doubt that even if they were true, were those things necessarily good? What did it mean to be her? A Sokovian orphan that repeatedly failed to save those around her. People had _died_ because of the limited control she had learned over her enhancements. Innocent people, who hadn’t even known her in Lagos. Her own neighbors in Sokovia. Her _brother_ after she let Tony create Ultron.

Just when she thought she would go mad from stewing in such thoughts, the door to her cell could be heard rising. The mechanic whirring was followed by someone’s voice. Not Pietro, but a brother to her, nonetheless.

“God, damn it,” Steve whispered under his breath before kneeling beside her. He continued to chide himself as he worked the shock collar and the straitjacket off. “We should’ve never left you behind. We should have stayed—especially for you, Wanda. I’m so sorry.”

She simply continued to stare ahead, not quite believing he was there. Half-convinced it was another passing delusion that would soon blur into all the rest.

It wasn’t until he was helping her stand, half-pulling her along as she clung to his arm did she truly process that she was leaving the underwater prison. Her teammates had come for her. Steve, and Sam, and Clint. Even Natasha had reappeared from wherever she’d gone after the fight in Leipzig. She met them on the quinjet just as they were settling in for takeoff, her knuckles bruised and her arms full with a plastic bin of their belongings. Or at least, what had fallen into the others’ possession from their mates. During the flight, such material things were distant from her teammates’ minds, as each of them alternated between pressing the Captain about where he was taking them and trying to check on Wanda, despite how she remained unresponsive. She was so overwhelmed, both by what she had endured at the prison and by how sudden her escape was.

They landed in the central city of Wakanda. From there, they were personally escorted by the country’s new king to a small safehouse somewhere in the outskirts of the city. It was there that the team had a proper reunion, complete with reclaiming their equipment, figuring what lost items were from whose mates, and planning their next course of action. Even Steve’s friend, Barnes was there. His metal arm was missing, with nothing but a felt cap over the leftover plates in his shoulder. He looked…different. Still tall and powerfully built, but also… _small_ without the metal limb. More like the unenhanced, innocent young man that had come before the Winter Soldier. The one Steve had described when he relayed memories of him on the flight home from Lagos.

Barnes hovered a ways away from the group, not unlike Wanda, herself. She pressed herself into a corner of the room, leaning against the wall for support. Still processing reality. Still floating back to the Raft, to a state of constant dread and anticipation for pain.

It did occur to her to at least attempt to listen to what the others were discussing. They were all she had now. Wherever they planned to go, she would have to go with them.

When she did tune into her teammates’ conversation, they were still splitting up their material possessions. Barnes had inched his way closer, his voice barely audible to Wanda from across the room.

“I can take her things to her. If it, um…if it helps any.”

There was a beat before Natasha stiffly answered, “She doesn’t have anything.”

“Not even from her mate?”

Another beat of silence. In her peripheral, Wanda caught the former Winter Soldier shuffling away with his head low, as if he was ashamed for even speaking.

_Don’t feel sorry for me,_ Wanda thought. _I do have a mate. She just doesn’t know. No one does._

And now, she was convinced no one would ever know. She had given up on reaching out to her mate, let alone trying to find them. Being sent to the Raft had taught her the extension of other people’s fear of her. She didn’t think she would be able to bear finding her soulmate if there was still a possibility they would be afraid of her, too. That they would reject her for who she was. If they hadn’t already. Not to mention, even if they could look past her enhancements, there was also the matter of her trauma. The Raft had brought all of it back to the surface, reminding her of just how much she had gone through. Not just there, but at Hydra. And while homeless in Novi Grad, and during her family’s apartment’s bombing…it was still so much for her to process. To unload it on someone else…

Those disheartening thoughts followed her throughout the safehouse. Even as she remained there for days, and then weeks, and eventually a month, she continued to simply exist in the background of her teammates’ lives, harboring her lonely and bruised self-image. Within those first few days, said teammates gradually left her. First, Clint and Scott flew back to America to negotiate a legal way back to their families. Then Sam, Steve, and Natasha began spending all of their time in the command center beneath the safehouse, scouting suspicious activity they may have to investigate in the future. All the while, Wanda stayed at ground level. Sleeping, mostly. Eating only when Sam and Natasha came up to eat with her (Steve would go to the back of the house to check in on Barnes). At night, she would stay up and simply muse over her thoughts. Over her past, and where she wanted to go from here. Whether she truly wanted to join her teammates when they returned to the field (albeit, in secret) when her confidence in her abilities was so shaken.

It was during one of those nights that she heard Barnes milling about in his room just across the hall from hers, clearly just as sleepless as she. He had maintained such an effective distance from the rest of the team, that Wanda only then remembered that he mostly stayed in the safehouse all day with her. Keeping a distance from her, as well. She didn’t think because he was afraid of her—his tentative attempt to be of some help to her the night they first arrived there spoke otherwise to that—but because he knew she needed the space to breathe. Maybe because he recognized that very need in himself after whatever he had gone through in Siberia, which had cost him his artificial arm.

Wanda grew to appreciate his presence. There was a comfort in knowing she wasn’t totally alone, but was with someone who didn’t expect anything from her. Someone who simply coexisted with her in their tiny space while their mutual friends kept busy in a glorified bunker underneath them. At some point, Wanda even started leaving things out for him, like an extra mug of tea after she had brewed some for herself or an extra blanket she would find in a closet while looking for something else. Just little things to let him know she remembered he was there, and was grateful for their companionable silence with each other.

Occasionally, she would encounter him in person, and even then, there was a certain respectful distance between them. Her telepathy could hear the surface of his mind (and since the Ultron incident, she refused to go any deeper in the mind) ticking with some sort of struggle. Perhaps a sense of pressure to be more sociable, or simply trying to get his thoughts in order given that he was carrying even more from the past than she. It was for the latter reason that she was uncertain how to take initiative on a conversation herself. She didn’t know how much he knew of her, let alone what was appropriate to bring up around him. So, she clung to polite ‘excuse me’s and ‘sorry’s whenever they brushed past each other in the kitchen or the hallway, and little else.

For an entire month, that was Wanda’s new norm. Politely coexisting with the former Winter Soldier, in the background of her teammates’ now remotely conducted operations. In that time, stress of the Raft and the memories it had reawakened slowly began to wane. The proverbial bruise was still there, but Wanda could feel some of her day-to-day energy returning. She even went down to the command center one night to visit her teammates instead of waiting for them to leave the workspace to check on her.

That night, she could instantly tell that there was something off with Steve. Not only was the surface of his mind eerily still, but his physical demeanor was as well. He sat quietly at one end of the long table where they had set up a workspace, leaving Sam to do whatever work was needed at the computer while Natasha put in some occasional words of advice from where she was observing the screen over his shoulder.

Wanda stepped closer to her Captain, a chill shooting up through her bare feet from the cold floor. Her shiver seemed to make Steve notice her in his peripheral. He sucked in a breath and sat up straighter. “Wanda, hey. Is everything OK?”

The witch simply nodded.

He reached for something on the chair on the other side of him. It was a thin, knitted throw blanket, which he held out for her to take. “Here. I know it gets cold down here.”

Wanda accepted the offer, though she only hugged it to her chest for the time being. “Are _you_ OK?” she asked softly, in case he didn’t want Nat or Sam to know something was wrong.

He waved a hand dismissively. “Yeah, yeah. We’re fine. Got a couple of hits we may start lookin’ into in person. If we can figure out a way to manage it without gettin’ caught, of course.”

That hadn’t answered her question. And the slip of his Brooklyn accent was telling.

Evidently, he knew she wasn’t assuaged. He slid off the tabletop without meeting her eye, looking towards Sam and Natasha instead. “It’s nothing, kid. Just overworking myself, I think.”

Louder, he added, “I’m ready to call it a night. I’m heading to bed.”

Sam grunted his acknowledgement. Natasha looked up, tipping her head towards Steve. “OK. I’ll be there in a minute,” she promised.

With that, Steve turned to leave, giving Wanda a friendly pat on the shoulder on the way. Once he was gone, the witch wandered closer to her other teammates, hoping to get something more out of them.

Natasha beat her to the point. “Don’t worry about him. He’s been brooding like that for the past couple of hours.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say. Though, it did start after his last check-in with Barnes. He says things are still alright, but…” Natasha trailed off uncertainly. “Something about it upset him. Probably the inevitable first lovers’ quarrel,” she added in an attempt to be light-hearted, though her smirk was clearly forced.

“Yeah, well,” Sam cut in, “at least now he’s actually starting to consider when we should head out for these missions.”

That took Wanda aback. Her teammates hadn’t yet disclosed with her the missions they were looking into at the moment. And now… “You’re leaving?”

Natasha sighed wearily, her eyes glazing over for a moment. “I am. Some things have come up back…back where I came from. I think I need to look into it. Alone.” With a glance at Sam, she added, “I think these two are still figuring out they’re end of it.”

Wanda’s heart suddenly felt heavier in her chest. “And…you want me to stay here?”

“Only if you want to,” Natasha assured quickly. “We thought it was still pretty soon for you. Maybe you could just sit out on a couple jobs, and check in with us when you were ready.”

When phrased like that, it _did_ sound like the most sensible course of action. Wanda was still in a touchy space, and her confidence in her ability to control her scarlet was at its lowest point. She didn’t want to lose the only people she trusted herself to be around, but she knew she couldn’t just hover in the background of fully-fledged field missions with them either. She couldn’t be a _bother_ while they were trying to resume their duties as Avengers.

Feeling self-conscious now, Wanda unwrapped the blanket in her arms and wrapped it around herself. As she did, she tried to nonchalantly shift the conversation. “What about Barnes? Will Steve keep checking in with him?”

“To be honest, I think that’s what came up during their meeting earlier,” Natasha replied. “I’ll try to ask him more about it when I head up there, myself.”

“Hey, whatever happens,” Sam piped up again, this time turning in his seat to properly face the two women, “we’ll figure it out. We just gotta play it safe and keep tabs on each other.”

Natasha nodded as if in agreement, though Wanda could hear the surface of her mind still ticking meticulously with troubled thoughts. She didn’t press her teammates any further, but the question of their next course of action lingered in her own mind even as she left them to their work. She made her way back upstairs with the intention of going to bed herself, and hopefully deciding if it wasn’t too soon for her to try field work again or not.

However, on her way to her bedroom, she passed by _him._ Barnes. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his sole remaining hand. He was so distressed by whatever was wildly buzzing at the surface of his mind that he didn’t notice her walk past, originally seeking to leave him be. Nor did he notice her turn back towards him at the threshold to the hallway leading to the bedrooms. He didn’t notice her until she spoke up, her frustration with her previous exchange with her teammates admittedly bleeding into her tone.

“What did you say to him?”

He startled, instantly shifting to find her standing behind him. Wanda felt a twinge of guilt for scaring him, but it wasn’t enough to sway her protective stance.

“Steve?” she pressed when he didn’t answer, even going so far as to step closer to him. “What did you say to him?”

“What do you mean?” Barnes managed, still looking caught off-guard.

“He was upset when I went to check on them. Was it because of your conversation earlier?”

There was another stall before Barnes managed to formulate an answer, his mouth parting slightly as his mind worked. Wanda didn’t push him this time, remembering that with a history like his, it may have been a struggle simply to keep a train of thought focused. Much like her own thoughts when she first left the Raft.

“I just told him about my meeting with the medics today. They want to put me in cryo-freeze, and I…I think I’m gonna let ‘em.”

This time, her tense demeanor did soften. She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but it certainly hadn’t been that. Not something to do with his treatment. With _cryo-freeze_ , which was something else she was familiar with because of how her Hydra handlers had spoken of it during her time there. How they had used the technology to keep him a prisoner as long as they had. Surely, that would invoke awful memories for him, just as her shock collar at the Raft had done for her and the electric prods used on her.

“You would be comfortable with that?”

“I’m…” He faltered, an expression of confusion crossing his face. “I mean, why wouldn’t I be?”

Wanda suppressed an urge to shudder as those uncomfortable memories of the past lurked too close for comfort. As she tugged the blanket about her shoulders more securely around herself, she weakly elaborated, “Isn’t that what you had to go through when you were…back there?”

His puzzled expression remained. “How do you know?”

She stepped back at his defensive tone, distantly aware that she was making herself smaller in an attempt to seem unthreatening. “I know their ways,” she explained simply. “They threatened to put us under as a punishment a few times.”

“You were there?”

Now his confusion spread to her, and she could feel her brow furrowing in a mirror gesture to his own. “That’s where I was enhanced. I thought Steve told you?”

“No.” He shook his head slightly, and he lowered his gaze. “I’m sorry. That must have been hell.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She didn’t know what to do with his sympathy, given how his tribulations under Hydra were much more extensive. She wasn’t sure if she should address that, or simply drop the conversation altogether. After all, he had no obligation to open up about his experiences to her. Despite living together for a month now, he had stayed close to Steve only. Even then, he was considering leaving for however long it would take to complete his treatment under the Wakandan medical team. Even though it distressed her Captain, she wasn’t willing to dissuade him from a decision like that. She should have just left him to himself.

Just as the thought occurred to her to leave him be now, he asked her, “How do they work? Your enhancements?”

At the mention of her scarlet, the witch instinctively bristled. Despite the time that had passed since being freed from the Raft, she was still sensitive to people’s innate fear of her powers. Even though she knew deep down that it was reasonable for someone with a history of brainwashing to be apprehensive of the mental-based nature of her powers, she didn’t think she could stand to be addressed like an inhuman weapon by yet another person.

“I’m not in your head, if that’s what worries you,” she stated with forced composure. “I don’t do that without permission. Not anymore…”

_Not since a monster that killed my brother told me to do it for his own gain._

“No, I wasn’t worried,” Barnes said quickly. “I just wanted to know. They…stood out to me. I mean…I never did thank you for using them to save me during the airport episode, did I?”

She shook her head, not believing his interest to be sincere. “Don’t. Please. It’s not necessary. Believe me, I know they’ve done more harm than good.”

There was a beat of silence, wherein her telepathy’s ear could hear the surface of his mind rapidly clicking in the familiar pattern of indignation. “That’s not true.”

Wanda grimaced in disbelief, pulling her blanket around herself again. “How can you know that?”

He didn’t respond, which she felt to be an answer in itself. She could hear the surface of his mind working, but it wasn’t promising enough to convince her to stay. She shifted her weight on her feet, readying to turn and leave like she should have to begin with.

And then he blurted something out. “What if you did look in my head?”

At first, the suddenness of the suggestion surprised her more than anything else. Then she fully processed what he meant, and that only fueled her confusion. “What?”

“You’re not bad,” he insisted with startling confidence, considering this was the most they had actually interacted with each other. “So, how bad can the things you’re capable of truly be? I doubt it can be any worse than what they did to me.”

He truly didn’t know anything about her powers. He didn’t know what they had done. How she’d unleashed a bomb onto an entire building of unsuspecting people because she had failed to use them to contain the explosion. How she had used them to manipulate Stark, leading to his creation of Ultron, who then wrecked Sokovia and _killed her brother._

No. She couldn’t risk something horrible like that happening again. Not to the soldier who had already endured enough. Not to her Captain’s best friend.

“No…” she said, her voice reminiscent of a whimper. “No, no, you can’t. I…I won’t put you at risk.”

“It can’t be worse than what’s already been done,” he repeated. “And I…I really don’t want to leave my friend again.” He faltered for a brief moment, his gaze becoming distant. Vulnerable. “I don’t want to go under. I know what it’ll remind me of. But Steve tells me you don’t need anything like that as a buffer. You just…see things directly.”

Well, that _was_ true. Evidently, Steve had told him enough about her powers to recognize how they could be helpful to a scattered mind like his. And he sounded certain—hopeful, even—of her control over them in order to serve that purpose. If it was something he was willing to try, regardless of her warnings there were risks, then perhaps she should at least consider it as well…

Her gaze wandered around the room, pointedly avoiding Barnes and his expectant face as she weighed their options with herself. She knew it wasn’t fair to him, given that it was more his decision than hers. If anything were to go wrong, _he_ would be more affected by it than she.

Still, in good conscience, she couldn’t just agree to use her scarlet on him like that. She wanted to share his confidence that it was even worth trying first.

“When do you have to talk to the medics again?” she asked softly.

“Tomorrow morning.”

She nodded at that. The morning. She had until then to decide what she wanted to tell him. She had until then to rebuild enough trust in herself to actually be a sufficient alternative to whatever procedure the Wakandan medical staff wanted to put him in cryo-freeze for.

However, she didn’t think she could do that with him watching her. Without a word of explanation, she turned and retreated to her room before she could second-guess the entire idea. As soon as the door there was closed behind her, she started pacing along the four walls. Her thoughts, similarly, continued to swirl in a disorderly tide within her head, constantly swaying back and forth between decisions.

She wanted to refuse. The Soldier had already been through so much. He had just now found a promising solution to his healing through the advanced science and medicine provided by King T’Challa and his medical team. If anything Wanda’s scarlet did to him complicated that, there was no telling how long it would take to direct him back to this promising state.

But it was a risk he was willing to take. It was an alternative he seemed to want, because it would be less physically taxing. It was an alternative she figured Steve would want as well, since it would mean not having to watch his best friend—the friend he had _just_ gotten back—go into cryo-genic freeze.

All that was really stopping her was her own fear. A fear of herself, which she would have to overcome anyways if she was ever going to join her teammates back in the field. She had to learn to control her fear, if she was ever going to learn to full control over her scarlet. She had to at least _try._ She had to.

That final decision wasn’t made until hours later. She even tried to lay down for sleep at one point, hoping she would wake with a clearer head after some rest. But she couldn’t get her mind to settle enough to fall asleep to begin with.

No, her mind had been set. And she couldn’t rest until she relayed it to Barnes, before she could change it again. By then, the sky outside was just beginning to lighten with the first promises of daylight. She could only hope that with their similar metabolisms, Barnes would be awake so early in the day, like Steve usually was. She rushed outside to his door down the hall from hers, losing momentum only when she actually reached it. It was still _his_ space, after all, and she may be unwelcome.

She knocked on the door timidly. Then again, slightly harder, out of concern that he hadn’t heard. An irrational thought considering his enhanced senses, but still.

He answered the door almost immediately after her second knock. She sucked in a breath, returning to her rushed pace before she could think twice of any of it. “I can try it once. Just so you know what it’s like. So you know what all of your options are.”

His expression became uncertain, but the surface of his mind settled to a calmer ticking of relief. “You don’t have to,” he insisted. “I didn’t mean to make it seem like you did. I can go under—”

“No,” she interrupted, equally insistent. “You don’t have to. If I can…if it makes you uncomfortable, you should be able to choose a better alternative. And I…” She faltered, glancing down at her hands. The outlet for her scarlet. Her tools for either making this better or worse.

“I need to try again,” she decided aloud. “To feel like myself, I mean. If it’s even still possible…”

She could hear something at the surface of his mind click in confusion. Though he thankfully didn’t speak on it. “OK,” he said instead, offering a small nod of encouragement. It was small, but she appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.

“Do you want to come in?” he offered a moment later, glancing at the room behind him.

Something about the gesture made it finally sink in for her. She had agreed to take him up on his suggestion to use her scarlet to look into his mind. How exactly she would use it to smother whatever was there so that he could live with it easier, she didn’t know yet.

It was too late now. With a soft breath to compose herself, she accepted his invitation inside with an awkward, “Sure.”

He stepped aside with another slight nod. Wanda stepped past the threshold into the room uneasily, hugging her arms around herself as the thought of being in a space reserved for someone else struck her again. Though it was clear there wasn’t really much for her to be intruding on. The room was just like her own, with a plain bed and desk, and little else. The only traces of personal souvenirs were a weathered backpack partially hidden underneath the desk and a black-and-white jacket hanging on the back of its accompanying chair.

That jacket…

She froze as she caught sight of it. As she _recognized_ it.

_No…it can’t be._

Initially, she tried to brush it off as merely the same pattern. But the longer she looked at it, even setting a hand atop it in an aborted effort to grab it, she could tell it wasn’t like the one Barnes usually wore. It was a track jacket, better suited for someone of a leaner build. A runner.

_It can’t be._

She exhaled shakily, summoning the strength to ask, “Where did you get this?”

The brief second it took for him to answer felt agonizing. “My soulmate lost it,” he admitted softly. “They asked me to keep it safe after their brother left, so…”

He didn’t finish the thought. Or perhaps she just didn’t hear. She felt like the entire world had fallen away, narrowing down to this one jacket and the revelation that came with it.

_It was my brother’s. I tried to throw it away because I was mad at him for leaving me._

She had written that in the note to her mate after Pietro died.

_Pietro._ Her last tie to Pietro. It was _here._

Her fingers curled into the fabric of the jacket. She pulled it off the chair in a daze, still not wholly believing it was true. She raised it to her face, hugging it to herself as if it was Pietro, himself. On her next breath, she even picked up that musty, earthy scent she had associated with him ever since their family’s apartment building had been bombed. She couldn’t believe it.

“It still smells like him.”

It was really his. Her mate had kept her brother’s jacket safe for her.

Her _mate._

James Barnes was her soulmate.

At some point, her eyes had slipped shut. When she opened them again, she looked back to him as if seeing a dear friend for the first time in years. _Recognizing_ a soul that had been tethered to her own.

And he recognized her, too. He was looking at her differently. Like he was terrified, ready to bolt the moment something went wrong. The moment _he_ did or said something wrong. But with it, there was also a sweeping surge of something peaceful at the surface of his mind. Something she could only liken to relief, in the same vein as being able to catch one’s breath after holding it for an extended amount of time. She felt a similar surge arise within her, driving her closer to him. She wanted to cry. She wanted to kiss him, to pull him close and hold him. She wanted to beg his forgiveness for all the time she’d spent angry with him for being absent.

However, once she was standing directly before him, all she could do was idly stare at him, clutching Pietro’s jacket close to her heart. Her words were lost, getting tangled in a useless knot in her throat as _he_ was the one to finally manage something.

“I tried to save everything,” he said, his tone laced with apology. “I held onto all of it, but…you know why I…?”

She nodded her understanding. “Yeah.”

_Material possessions may compromise them or a mission._ It made sense for that to be the standard protocol for all human assets of Hydra. And the way they’d punished Pietro when he’d tried to hold on to his mate’s lost belongings…

“They hurt you, didn’t they? For the things I lost when I was little?” She was nodding before he could respond, already knowing what the answer would be. She barely even got the question out, her voice so thick with emotion at the mere thought of Barnes—her _mate—_ suffering the way she and Pietro had. Suffering like that for as _long_ as he had. He had been there for so long, and she had lost things so frequently while travelling between foster homes. And— _oh._

“Oh,” she whimpered aloud, covering her mouth with her hand in horror. “The bomb…”

The day she was pulled out from its rubble. The day she had lost _so much_ all at once. What had they done to him? How badly did they hurt him? She wanted to know more than anything, but also, she didn’t think she would be able to stomach it. To hear how, even indirectly, _she_ had hurt him.

“They kept me going,” he insisted, as if in direct response to her thoughts. “Knowing somebody was out there, waiting for me on the other side…”

She choked out a sob, struck by the icy reminder that she _hadn’t_ been on the other side. She had walked right into Hydra’s grasp, never realizing her own mate was there with her. Never knowing what they were doing to him.

God, all that time she’d spent angry with him, wishing he would reciprocate one of her lost belongings or notes…he had just been trying to survive. 

“Even when I got out,” he went on, the words pouring out like they had been bottled up within him forever, “I wanted to keep you safe, so I…I thought it would be better to stay away. I thought you wouldn’t want…all of this. But I _never_ stopped wanting you.”

Some of her gathering tears escaped as she realized what he was referring to. She nuzzled her face into Pietro’s jacket, as if hoping to physically push back the storm of simultaneous guilt and consolation that she’d had a mate all this time that had actually kept as many of her lost belongings as they could manage, and read her notes (at least, those she sent after he escaped Hydra).

_I understand now why you don’t want me._

Oh, how wrong she had been. She had been so wrong about _him._ His silence all along had either been against his choice or from efforts to protect her from this life of being used, or being hunted all of the time. A life she had invited herself into anyways.

_The director says he wants to interview any survivors from our base for compatibility with the Asset._

Had someone at Hydra pieced together where she was because of the things their Asset had received from her? Had they recruited volunteers from Novi Grad because of it? Had _fate_ sent her there because he was there? Because she was meant to find him, to rescue him?

_Fate puts us where we’re meant to be._

She had failed to find him back then. She had failed _him._

The beginnings of another sob escaped her. “You were right there. _Right there_ with us. And I never…I’m sorry! I’m sorry I—”

Her upset set off his own. He brought his hand up to carefully hold her face in a gesture that was as comforting and familiar as something a dear friend had done for her throughout her entire life. “Don’t be sorry. You didn’t know—”

She shook her head, unsatisfied with that. She should have known. For all the power her enhancements had given her, she should have at least sensed her own soulmate was being kept near her.

“I should have known. I should have…”

Her emotions got the best of her, making her breath hitch for a moment. She forced herself to take a breath, to recapture what she needed to say. “You deserve someone who would have saved you.”

_Someone who would have protected_ you.

His mouth parted to counter her words, only to lose his own at the last moment. It wasn’t until a few heartbeats later that he found instead, “You survived your end of it. That’s enough. It's all I could have asked for.”

She swallowed hard, struggling to accept that. It wasn’t likely her own mate had any reason to be anything other than sincere with her, but still.

Her mate. She still couldn’t quite grasp it. She had found him. Hell, she had been living with him for weeks now.

And he was beautiful. A hardened, but resilient soul whose mind was tragically scattered, but at the same time, soothingly simple to her telepathy’s ear. One who had seen so many similar things to what she had under the same captors she’d had. One who understood her, in that way. One who _wasn’t afraid_ of her, even trusting her enough to give her scarlet a chance at easing his frayed mental state.

Her mother had been right. _You’re connected to them because they will understand things about you that no one else will. They will know how to love you for it._

_Just like you will love them._

Barnes momentarily pulled her out of her reverie with his hand coming up to hold her face again, this time sweeping away a few rogue tears with his thumb. “Thank you,” he said softly, “for not giving up on me. I know it couldn’t have been easy, thinking I wasn’t there.”

As much as she _had_ struggled with that throughout her younger years, it felt like a distant concern now. She moved to cradle his face as well, seeking to offer the same comfort his gesture had given her while still holding Pietro’s jacket securely to her with her other hand. “It’s alright. I figured we were different after you sent the second letter. Maybe even a little before then…”

Maybe even as far back as her childhood. When her father had first suggested that her mate’s silence had more to do with something that had happened to them than anything she had done. Granted, she (nor her parents) would have likely ever fathomed that something to be _this._ A life of torture, and brainwashing, and imprisonment.

Oh, how she wished she could have saved him.

She raised her hand to his hair, combing through it a few times. Mostly for her own sake, to remind herself that he was here now. That the past was past. However, she could still feel a few tears collecting in her eyes, threatening to slip past her resolve. Eventually, she pulled her hand away to smother them with the backs of her fingers.

“I’m sorry,” she said, breathing a laugh at her own embarrassment with herself. God, she was a mess. “I’m not usually like this. I just…I didn’t think this would ever happen.”

_I didn’t think you would want me._

A sinking feeling fell in the pit of her stomach as she remembered the reasons he still may not. How she had used to use her powers against people, including those who would become her own teammates. How people died in the Battle of Sokovia and the bombing in Lagos because of her abilities. How she _volunteered_ for the life he had been trying to protect her from. “Do you, um…do you know what I’ve done?”

Barnes offered a sheepish grin, as if embarrassed to say he didn’t. “You really haven’t been in my head, have you?”

She wanted to smile at that, at least out of relief that she still had a chance to break the story of her past to him gently, on her own terms, but she couldn’t quite manage it.

Suddenly, his face became graver. “Do you know what _I_ did?”

The witch nodded honestly. “The gist of it. Steve said you never had a choice, though.”

His expression only darkened, his gaze turning somber. _Anxious._

Before she could question it, he blurted, “I’m sorry you had to wait so long. I’m sorry _I_ made you wait so long.”

He cut himself off, his eyes growing distant as he was plagued by whatever worrying thoughts he’d had before. Her telepathy could hear them clicking at the surface of his mind, battling for decision. Wanda reached for him anew in her concern, pausing only to sling Pietro’s jacket over her shoulder, so she could frame his face with both hands now.

“Sergeant?” she pressed tentatively.

That succeeded in bringing him back to her.

“James,” spilled out of him. Then, nervously, he added, “It’s James Buchanan Barnes, actually. Steve calls me Bucky, but I…” He hesitated, his previous solemnity returning for the briefest of moments before his expression softened back into sheepishness. “But you can call me whatever you want.”

She couldn’t help but smile at that, relieved that his thoughts had returned to a more innocuous mood. “Alright. And you can call me Wanda.”

“OK…Wanda.” He whispered her name, sounding equal parts flustered and reverent. Like it was some sort of esteemed privilege to be given her name. She couldn’t recall ever feeling so revered before. Certainly not with such earnestness. Not with the depth of someone who fate itself had entwined her soul with.

Her soulmate. _Hers._

_My James,_ she thought wistfully, sweeping her thumb along the soldier’s cheek. He leaned into the touch, the tension in his shoulders finally ebbing away as he seemed to surrender to his own enjoyment of the affectionate gesture. She could even hear the surface of his mind calming as well, slowing to only a couple of tranquil, rhythmic ticks.

And then suddenly, “I’m not going under,” he declared, his tone the most resolute she had ever heard from him. “I can’t leave now. After all you did for me while I was—”

“No,” she interrupted with a slight shake of her head. As much as she treasured his trust in her, even before realizing the extent of their connection to each other, she still didn’t trust _herself_ enough to simply let him disregard his previously determined treatment. “If you need it, James—”

“I’ll ask them to find another way,” he insisted. “Maybe if you’re still willing to help—”

“Of course I am.” She could feel heat pooling in the back of her neck at the mere suggestion she would give up trying to help him. Especially now. “I just…I’m still afraid of doing something wrong. Making it worse.”

“You won’t. I told you, I trust you. And nothing you do can be worse than what’s already there.”

“James—”

“And if you say you need to try this, then I want to give you the chance to do it. You’ve given me so much, that I…I owe you this, at least.”

“No, you don’t,” she cut in, surprising even herself with how firm her voice became. “You don’t owe me anything. That’s not why I did any of it.”

James didn’t argue with that, nodding apologetically instead. She felt her very being soften again at the sight.

“And I would give you more,” she swore, “if I had anything of mine left.”

“Why? After I left you alone for so long?”

“You did what you thought you had to. You _survived._ That’s enough.”

He frowned, either from having his own words turned back on him or from disagreement that it was truly enough. Or both. Regardless, she meant what she said. Now that she finally knew why he hadn’t been able to reciprocate her offerings, it truly was enough for her to have him here, _alive_ despite all that he’d been through.

“It’s alright. We’ll be alright now,” she promised, hoping to soothe the distressed buzzing that arose at the surface of his mind. She gently urged him closer, resting her forehead to his as if she could will the stillness of her own mind to soothe his (even though she refused to use her scarlet for direct aid unless it was explicitly asked for). It did seem to calm him a little, prompting him to nuzzle even closer as if seeking more of that physical affection the same way one might seek warmth from the cold.

For a long minute, that was all she wanted. To hold him close, safe in her embrace, where she could feel him breathing easily and hear the surface of his mind stirring at a mellow pace. A moment of peace after the dark, difficult road it had taken to find him. A moment of closeness, something she hadn’t had with anyone since her brother was alive. Such closeness that she could feel James’s breath on her skin, and then his kiss against her lips. Or maybe she kissed him. She couldn’t entirely tell. She didn’t entirely _care._

Her mate wanted her. Her mate _loved_ her. She could feel it in how timid his kiss was, how gentle he was even when he brought his hand up to cup the side of her face. As if wanting to hold her to him while also offering her the free reign to pull away if she that was what she wanted. But she didn’t. She wanted to melt into him, to relish in how good it felt to be with him. How much it felt pure, and safe, and _right._

Afterward, he peppered more kisses along her jaw, hugging her closer with his sole remaining arm around her waist. Wanda happily held him in return, exhaling a relieved breath she didn’t know she had been holding.

The sound must have seemed more tired than she thought, for he abruptly pulled away after. “I’m sorry, I…I know this has all probably been…it’s been a long night. We should—I mean, if you want, I…I should let you get some rest.”

Before she could answer, he added in a softer, bashful voice, “Would you…do you want to stay here? Just for a bit. You can have the bed.”

She couldn’t manage much more than an appreciative smile, finally actually feeling the weight of the aforementioned night sink into her bones. Though she still felt slightly off about being in an environment reserved for him, alone. And she wasn’t ready to let go of him just yet.

She did find herself on his bed with Pietro’s jacket draped over her a few moments later, but refused to untangle her fingers from James’s in an unspoken request he lay with her. A small, “come here,” escaped her, and that was all it took for him to relent. Once he had laid out, she curled into his side, holding him close to her again. Clinging, really, with her arm wrapped around his middle, knotting part of his shirt in its hand.

“I’m here,” he promised once he noticed that, amusement coloring his tone. “I’m not gonna go anywhere. I meant what I said about not going under. I’ve at least gotta find something to give you, first.”

Now that she was finally off of her feet and nestled comfortably in her mate’s embrace, she couldn’t summon the energy to argue how unnecessary that was. She couldn’t even pretend that a large part of her did want that, for him to not go into cryo-freeze. For the chance to help him herself, so he wouldn’t have to go through something that made him uncomfortable. So that she wouldn’t have to lose someone else she loved.

“You’re enough,” she assured, the weight of oncoming sleep admittedly slurring her words a bit. “Just want you. Just missed you.”

A lingering kiss was pressed to the top of her head. “OK. Just me, then.”

He continued to murmur hopeful promises for the future as she drifted, lulling her further into that restful hold of sleep. She finally succumbed to nothingness with the comfort that he would, indeed, be there when she woke. That she had found someone that fate would not take from her. For the first time in forever, she felt like she was where she was meant to be.


End file.
